Saturday, November 17, 2012

Last month, our Dish Trip team hit Chicago for a lil' culinary exploration. While the full scoop on that portion of the trip is a-coming, as part of our stay, we attended one of Southwest's exclusive Cardmember Dinners at Sprout Restaurant.I scribed up the experience over on Southwest Nuts' About Southwest Blog (which you can read HERE), which includes our in-the-kitchen interview with Chef Dale Levitski (yes, of Top Chef fame).If you tune into the below video, you'll catch the chef whipping up a superb Pumpkin Soup — one of the five courses we tried that night. The pumpkin soup was a pleasant seasonal surprise, with elaborate textural components like seasoned mascarpone cheese, Honeycrisp apples and unexpected pumpkin seeds — which gave a final, crunchy punch. Love to revisit that slurp one day again soon — and, Sprout as a whole.

It started with the fried chicken. Once a week on a Friday night, Cafette featured their signature crispy skinned chicken, a salty, savory dish that through the years — twenty to be exact — developed a fiend-worthy following. But, just because the offering would sell out before every Friday night’s end, they never extended their offering — it was meant for a Friday night, and that was the official plan.So, when Cafette established their twenty year anniversary menu for last month, you’d expect the notorious seasoned bird to gracefully find its place in the lineup — you know, only on the Friday nights that the month-long, celebratory menu was offered.Since I am one to release a few chicken-fried hallelujahs when they are due, I decided an appropriate crunch time to visit Cafette was during their twenty year anniversary month. It was a most important sojourn to see what all the fresh-out-of-the-hot-skillet fuss was about, and to gobble up what is said to be the area’s holy grail of flaky crust, flavorful meat, and overall, comfort food bliss!Continue reading my article HERE, on ChestnutHillDish.com.